5TB beast is mighty big, mighty fast'n'green

This product comes as a 2U rack shelf and uses single level cell (SLC) flash. It is, TMS claims, the highest capacity SLC SSD on the market, as well as the fastest at 250,000 sustained I/Os per second (IOPS) for random reads and random writes. The throughput is 3GB per second and latency 80 microseconds for writes. Just to knock a nail in the hard disk drive coffin for apps the RamSan-620 is targeted at, TMS says this is 60 times less than a high-performance HDD.

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It assures us that, in order to achieve similar performance, a HDD setup would require up to 500 drives, occupy 36 disk enclosures requiring almost three racks, consume upwards of 7,000 Watts, and cost over half a million dollars by the time the enclosures and controllers were included. The RamSan-620 needs 325 watts.

TMS states: "Competing flash SSD offerings from traditional storage suppliers lack density, are massively power-hungry due to oversized storage controllers and are built on architectures that slow down the underlying flash media."

Targeted application areas are online transaction processing, data warehousing, high-performance data acquisition, batch processing, and video editing. A RamSan-620 can support 2 to 8 Fibre Channel or InfiniBand ports. It has embedded management capabilities and one or more RamSan-620s can be integrated into a mixed storage infrastructure and then monitored and managed through a common management framework.

Woody Hutsell, president of Texas Memory Systems, said: "This really is a breakthrough of giant, green storage that is affordable for mainstream IT shops across industries."

It is TMS' 15th generation RamSan product and available now although no prices were released. In effect, TMS is telling SSD upstarts like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, with its 4TB product, that it is the king of the SSD storage jungle and is going to stay there. We'll see what happens as they bulk up their products. ®